Music and acquisition of Dutch word stress by French learners: Project of psycholinguistic and didactic analysis

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French and Dutch have different word prosodic systems: French has a ‘primary accent’ which falls on the final syllable of the word (group), whereas Dutch has a variable word stress with a lexical property (e.g. ondergaan: to go down / ondergaan: to undergo, to go through). This difference leads to difficulties for French learners to perceive and to produce Dutch word stress. Based on the literature about the parallelism between music and language and about the effect of music (training) on language abilities, this project aims to examine whether music (music training and/or music as a didactic tool) could help French students to perceive and/or to produce Dutch word stress. In order to answer this question, university students, musicians and non-musicians, will be tested in a perception task and a production task. The perception test will be an auditory match-to-sample task in which subjects would be separated in three conditions: naturally spoken stimuli, stimuli spoken to a beat, sung stimuli. The production test will consist of a reading task with a pretest-intervention-posttest design in which the intervention will be spoken, spoken to a beat or sung. The poster provides further details about the context, the research questions and the project methodology.

Degrave, Pauline. Music and acquisition of Dutch word stress by French learners: Project of psycholinguistic and didactic analysis.Center for Human Adaptive Systems & Environment's Summer School I: The dynamics of music and language. (Fish Camp, California, du 18/05/2014 au 24/05/2014).